Father Giammaria had taken a fancy to him because he was active and handy in the kitchen, and at all other work; and served mass as though he had never done anything else in his life, with his eyes cast down, and his lips primmed up like a seraph. Now that he no longer served the mass, he still had the same downcast eye and compressed lips, when it was a question of some scandal among the gentry, or of the common lands being put up to auction, or of swearing the truth before the magistrate.
No one dared to go to law with him; and if he cast his eyes on a farm for sale, or on a lot of the common land up at auction, the magnates of the place themselves, if they ventured to bid against him, did so with obsequious bows, offering him pinches of snuff. One day he and no less a person than the Baron himself were at it a whole day—pull devil, pull baker. The Baron was doing the amiable, and his Reverence, seated opposite to him, with his cloak gathered up between his legs, at every advance in the bidding offered him his silver snuff-box, sighing, “What are you going to do about it, Baron?” At last the lot was knocked down to him, and the Baron took his pinch of snuff, green with vexation.
This sort of thing quite met the views of the peasants; they were used to seeing the big dogs fight among themselves over a good bone, and leave nothing for the little ones to gnaw. But what made them complain was that this man of God ground them down worse than the very Antichrist, when they had to share the crops with him; and he had no scruples about seizing his neighbour’s goods, because the apparatus of the confessional was all in his hands, and if he fell into mortal sin he could easily give himself absolution. “It is everything to have the priest in one’s own house,” they sighed. And the shrewdest of them denied themselves the very bread out of their mouths, so as to send one of their sons to the seminary.
“When one gives himself up to the land, one has to do it altogether,” his Reverence used to say, as an excuse for considering no one. The mass itself he only celebrated on Sundays, except when there was nothing else to do; he was not one of those wretched starveling priests who have to run after the three tari of the mass fee. He had no need of it. So much so that the Bishop, arriving at his house on a pastoral visit, and finding his breviary covered with dust, wrote thereon with his finger, “Deo gratias!” But his Reverence had other things to think of besides wasting his time in reading the breviary, and laughed at the Bishop’s reproof. If the breviary was covered with dust, his oxen were sleek and shining, his sheep were thick in fleece, and the crops as tall as a man, so that his tenants, at any rate, could enjoy the sight of them, and build fine castles in the air—till they had to settle accounts with their landlord. It was a relief to their hearts, poor souls. “Crops that are like witchcraft! The Lord must have passed by them in the night! One can see that they belong to a man of God, and it is a good thing to work for him who has the mass and the blessing in his hand!” In May, at the season when they watched the sky with anxious looks for every passing cloud, they knew that their landlord was saying mass for the harvest, and was a better protection against the Evil Eye and the bad season than pictures of saints or blessed loaves. As for the latter, his Reverence would not have them scattered about among the crops, because, as he said, they only served to attract sparrows and other noxious birds. Of sacred pictures he had his pockets full; he got as many as he wanted, of the best kind, in the sacristy, without spending a penny, and made presents of them to his labourers.
But at harvest-time he came riding up on horseback, along with his brother, who acted as his bailiff, with his gun over his shoulder, and never left the spot. He slept out in the fields, in spite of the malaria, so as to look after his interests, without troubling himself about God or man. The poor wretches who, in the fine season, had forgotten the hard days of the winter, remained open-mouthed, hearing him run over the litany of their debts. “So many pounds of beans that your wife came to fetch at the time of the snow. So many faggots handed over to your son. So many bushels of grain you have had in advance, for seed, with interest, at so much a month. Now make up the account.” A confused account enough. In that year of dearth, when Uncle Carmenio had left his sweat and his health in his Reverence’s fields, he was forced, when harvest came, to leave his donkey there too, to pay his debts, and went off empty-handed, with ugly words in his mouth—blasphemies that were enough to freeze your very blood. His Reverence, who was not there to hear confessions, let him swear,—and led the ass into his own stable.
But after 1860, when heresy had triumphed, what good did all his power and influence do him? The country people learning to read and write, and able to add up accounts better than he himself; parties fighting for office in the municipal government, and sharing the spoils without a consideration in the world for any one but themselves; the next beggar in the street able to get legal advice for nothing, if he had a quarrel with you, and force you to pay the costs alone! A priest was nothing whatever nowadays—either for the judge or the militia captain; he could no longer, by dropping a hint, get people imprisoned if they failed in respect to him; in fact, he was good for nothing but to say mass and hear confessions, just as though he were a servant of the public. The judge was afraid of the papers—of public opinion—of what Tom, Dick, and Harry would say—and balanced his decisions like Solomon! They even envied his Reverence the property he had acquired in the sweat of his brow; they had “overlooked” him and cast spells on him; the little he ate at dinner tortured him at night; while his brother, who led a hard life and dined on bread and garlic, had the digestion of an ostrich, and knew very well that, in a hundred years’ time, when he, the priest, was dead, he would be his heir, and find himself rich without lifting a finger. His mother, poor body, was past work now—she survived only to suffer herself and be a trouble to other people—helpless in her bed with paralysis; she had to be waited on, instead of waiting on him. Everything went wrong in these days.
“There’s no religion now—no justice—no anything!” he would grumble, as he was growing old. “Now everybody wants to have his say. Those who have nothing want to grab your share. ‘Get out of that and let me get in!’ That’s it! They’d like to reduce the priests to sacristans—leave them nothing to do but say mass and sweep out the church. They don’t want to obey God’s commandments any more—that’s what’s the matter with them!”
G. Verga.
PADRON ’NTONI’S POLITICS.
... Padron ’Ntoni knew nothing about politics, and contented himself with minding his own affairs, for he used to say, “He who has charge of a house cannot sleep when he pleases,” and “He who commands has to give account.”